Integration of Configuration Management and Hypermedia for Managing Changes in Database Applications

Existing version control approaches in database management systems (DBMSs) are still limited to providing version control functionality for the rollback to a previous state of the database itself and/or database schemas. The interrelations between changes to software artifacts produced during a database development process such as specifications, design diagrams, documentation, and database itself are not well managed by an DMBS. This paper presents an integrated approach that combines the structure-oriented software configuration management (SCM) and versioned hypermedia to control logical changes to software artifacts including entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs) and schema constructs, and to maintain consistent configurations among those constructs and versions of data. Logical connections among specifications and elements of an ERD are represented as hyperlinks and versioned as well.